Engsmooth

I hear what you're saying and you're undoubtedly rght to make that point. However, that still doesn't change the fact that England have consistently selected the wrong bowlers and either bowled poorly or the wrong length for these pitches. Why is Panesar bowling so short? Why are they all bowling so short?

It's unfair to pick on Panesar, as in my opinion at least, it's been the quicker bowlers that have been mostly at fault, but even still Panesar has been extremely poor this series and I simply cannot understand why he's pulled his length back. The Sri Lankan batsmen, not only good at playing spin generally, know their own pitches and are simply sitting on the back foot watching the ball onto the bat at the lengths Panesar has been bowling at. When he has pitched it up, drawing batsmen onto the front foot, the ball can spit off the pitch and cause problems - he's far more effective like that, because it brings his bounce into the equation.

I've also seen Panesar being used as a defensive option in this series, bowling a foot outside leg stump to try and slow the run rate down, that is not what Panesar is good at and he should be used as an atacking option.

I also hear and acknowledge the grumbles about the poor umpiring decisions, but I just don't buy into it - sorry. Sure some decisions have not gone Englands way, tough luck, get on with it, you make your own luck on the cricket pitch. I could go into a long diatribe about sports psychology and how it affects players performances, perhaps I will sometime but not now. That's all about how when you're playing well and appear to be on top things go for you, but that's simply because you ignore the poor and bad decioons, because you don't need them - you're making your own luck by 'superlative' performance and England, lets admit here are far from superlative at the moment, they're ragged, sloppy and generaly pretty damned poor. That's when you whinge about the poor decisions.

Umpires are human, they makes mistakes, they'll always make mistakes and if they make on average 30 mistakes per 10 Test matches, nothings to say that they won't make 10 in one and 20 in 9, that's the way averages make monkeys of us.

Yes, the fielding hasn't supported the bowlers as well as it should, the bowlers have been wrong selections and bowled the wrong lengths and the batsmen have been pretty **** poor as well, I see nothing in there to be particuarly pleased about, do you? And neither am I willing to accept the excuses of poor fielding, poor batting or poor umpiring decisions and neither should you, because England simply haven't been good enough in all departments to even compete in this series and the bowling in my opinion has been the worst of the lot.

It would be easy to blame the batsmen after todays debacle and I'm sure many will, but we should all be more interested in why they collapsed in they way they did - pressure does that, a huge declared first inning total from Sri Lanka created that huge batting pressure and it was the general failure of the bowlers (and the fielders if it makes you happy) to keep the chasing total down to something acheivable by our own batsmen, that caused it.

To repeat an often used phrase, you cannot win test matches unless you take 20 wickets, regardless of how many runs you score so that leaves one of two likely outcomes - a draw or a loss and as England have consistently failed to take 20 wickets per game, those are the two outcomes they've got because they've not even looked close to taking 20 wickets per game and that, I'm afraid to say is very much down to the bowling (and fielding) departments.